Kowtows and Karaoke - The Month of May can go EFF itself

I don't know about you, but I for one am ready to flush the month of May down the crapper like an unwanted sanitary napkin. This past month was supposed to include a week in Edmonton, a week in Ottawa, and then a trip to Germany, in which we were to see The National, live in concert in Munich on Monday. But instead, it turned into an exhausting month of endless hospital visits to see our ailing family members. If you were related to us, you had a distinctly elevated chance of being hospitalized this past month.

Before we could close out the month, we had to attend a funeral, in which buddhist monks performed rituals to send off the spirit of my uncle. There were a lot of calls to 'chant along with us', which would have been fine if I could speak Mandarin/ read Chinese, but I don't. Not to make light of a very sombre and melancholic event, but due to this, there was a lot of random kowtowing and mumbling the sounds of passages I knew not the meaning of. Imagine being asked to sing a song you didn't know at karaoke, in Ukrainian. Difficult, at best.

And if there's one thing I've learnt, it's that nothing can prepare you for the emotion of seeing a casket of a loved one being closed. There is a heavy feeling of finality to that gesture that hits you deep in the chest, knocking the wind out of you.

Here's hoping the light of June will bring less ill tidings and tragedy for all.







Photos above taken with a Holga 120N on Ilford XP2 Super 400. Shot inside the grounds of Gyeongbokgung Palace in Seoul, Korea last year.